1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a machine for accurately and cleanly cutting material, and in particular to such a machine for cutting axial sections or slices from a cylinder, such as a roll or log, of material. The machine is applicable for cutting slices from rolls of sheet material, such as pressure sensitive material, paper, textile, film, foam and sponge, and it will be convenient to hereinafter describe the invention in relation to that exemplary application. It is to be appreciated, however, that the invention is not limited to that application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Australian patent 590064 in the name of the present applicant discloses a machine that has proved very successful in accurately and cleanly slicing rolls or logs of sheet material, particularly logs of sheet material coated with pressure sensitive adhesive and sliced into adhesive tapes. However, that machine has a high capital cost which is difficult to economically justify unless the machine is operated on a substantially continuous basis. In particular, intermittent, low volume or specialist use of the machine is often not economically viable.
Relatively simple cutting or slicing machines have been developed for such use. Those machines replace some of the automatic and machine driven operations with manual operations. In particular, movement of a material cutting blade into locations at which the material is to be sliced is usually achieved manually, rather than through machine driven mechanisms and controls.
Although these simplifications have been found to significantly reduce capital costs, it has been at the expense of ease of operation of the machine and cutting accuracy. In that regard, the arrangements for manually moving the cutting blade have made precise location of the blade difficult. Sometimes, it is not possible to infinitely locate the blade, so that roll or log slicing is limited to a specific range of slice thicknesses. Even then, the accurate repetitive location of the blade can require considerable operator expertise and concentration in order to produce roll or log slices of consistent thicknesses. The general use of unskilled operators for such machines usually means that this is not achieved over any long period of time. In any event, that blade locating procedure is time consuming and typically makes the machine operationally inefficient.